About the Book

Iconoclast and best-selling author Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has spent a lifetime observing, thinking, and writing about the cultures of animals. In this compulsively readable book, she provides a plainspoken, big-picture look at the commonality of life on our planet from the littlest microbes to the largest dinosaurs.

Inspired by the idea of symbiosis in evolution—that all living things evolve in a series of cooperative relationships—Thomas takes readers on a journey through the progression of life. Fervently rejecting “anthropodenial,” the notion that non-human life does not share characteristics with humans, Thomas instead shows that paramecia can learn, plants can communicate, humans aren’t really as special as we think we are—and it doesn’t take a scientist to marvel at the smallest inhabitants of the natural world and their connections to all living things.

This joyfully written book is a fascinating look at the challenges and behaviors shared by creatures from bacteria to larvae to parasitic fungi, a potted hyacinth to the author herself, and all those in between.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, an anthropologist and animal behaviorist, has published thirteen previous books, including the New York Times bestseller, The Hidden Life of Dogs, Dreaming of Lions, The Tribe of Tiger, The Old Way, and The Hidden Life of Deer.Her most recent book is Tamed and Untamed: Close Encounters With the Animal Kind, co-authored with Sy Montgomery.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has spent a lifetime observing other creatures and other cultures from her own backyard to the African Savannah. Her books have transported millions into the hidden lives of animals. She’s chronicled the daily lives of African tribes, and even imagined the lives of prehistoric humans. Now, she opens the doors to her own.

Dreaming of Lions traces Thomas’s life from her earliest days, including when, as a young woman in the 1950s, her family left for the Kalahari Desert to study the Bushmen….Read More